CrapScrabble (UPDATED! Now with more gravy!)

My friend, Dr. Pants, just pointed out that I’ve never been on TableTop before, and that’s true, but it’s also true that the games I’m really good at are mostly made up by me and my family. But that’s sort of nice because it makes it easier to win if I’m the only one who knows the rules.

My favorite game is Drunk-Catchphrase, which is just Catchphrase but…you know…drunk. Basically, in each round of play you have to drink for different things. Like a drink every time you think you’re explaining one word but really it’s a different word but you’ve been using it wrong your whole life. The other team drinks if you’re using the wrong word but your partner also has been using the word wrong and guesses the answer. Then the next round you have to drink every time you say the word “Um”. Then you pass out.

CrapScrabble is my second favorite game and was invented by us when my parents came to visit.

Everyone grabs a handful from our giant bowl filled with hundred of old scrabble tiles (and stray dice and some runes for some reason). Longest word you can bullshit wins.

On our last game of CrapScrabble my dad won with “rigortotoise.” (The second stage of turtle death.) He also came up with “ereptiledysfunction” (when your cyber lizard won’t reboot).

My father is dangerous at CrapScrabble.

Full rules of CrapScrabble:

Points are given for creativity, lying with confidence, and stealing tiles from other players without them noticing.

Points are subtracted for subpar puns, getting caught cheating, and not getting me a drink when you got one for yourself.

If the cat lays down on your tiles they are no longer yours and you must play around the cat until she leaves.

If the cat jumps on the table and scatters all the tiles you have to yell “JENGA” and grab up all the tiles near you. This is your new hand.

Tiles knocked to the floor are out of play (unless it’s your birthday or you’re under 12, in which case you get them all, but only if you get them from the cats before they knock them under the refrigerator).

Tiles under the refrigerator stay out of play until we get a new refrigerator.

Tiles may be exchanged for a new set, but only if the player does a funny dance first or tells an acceptably embarrassing story about themselves or someone else at the table.

Rules are subject to random change at any moment as long as the new rule is accepted by the majority of the table.

You can turn any tile over to make it a blank tile, but only if you first do that knife trick where you splay open your hand and quickly stab in between each finger. If you succeed you get as many blank tiles as the room thinks you deserve. If you fail we get to replace your tiles with our extra Q’s for however long it takes you to apply the tourniquet.

Cats can never be banned from the game, but a live ferret or a particularly angry bird may be used as a substitute cat, if medically necessary.

So, this post is my official challenge to TableTop. Let’s do this thing. (But you have to come here, because my cats get travelers’ diarrhea something fierce and you do not want that.)

UPDATED: The brilliant KWadsworth just shared the best thing ever with us and now it’s going in the game too. I’ll let her explain:

It is time to tell you about Surrealist Poker.

This was something that my college friends came up with (I’ll explain how shortly) where the twist in the rules doesn’t apply to the game play – rather, it applies to the BETTING. It’s just plain old, straight-up, five-card-draw poker; but, you can bet anything. And I mean literally ANYTHING.

What I mean is – the dealer for each hand deals out the first five cards like usual. The dealer also has a piece of paper and a pen. And the first person opens the bidding by stating what they are going to bid – and it can be ANYTHING IN THE ENTIRE WORLD. One opening bid I remember was “three cacti”. The dealer writes that down. And then everyone else has a turn betting, and they too can bet ANYTHING. And the dealer writes all that down.

The fun comes in with the discussions people have negotiating the comparative worth of each bid – does “a herd of stampeding Mogwai” MATCH the current bid of “1953”, or does it RAISE the bid? Because if it raises the bid, everyone has to go around and either ante up with something else, or fold. And of course their new bid could end up unintentionally raising the bid again, which sets off another round of discussion, and often another round of bidding.

Once you’ve all settled on all the bidding and are finished, it’s time to show your hands – and the winning hand is ascertained the same way it is in regular poker. And then the dealer reads off the ENTIRE LIST of all of the random shit that’s been bid over the course of that hand before presenting it to the winner. Then you get another dealer, another piece of paper, and you start over.

This was PERFECT for a bunch of arty and nerdy college students who had more creativity and goofiness than they had money or shame. And I did actually win 1953 in a hand once.

(I said I was going to explain how this happened – it’s actually even more ridiculous; a couple in our ranks were apparently playing strip poker once, and played to the point where they were both sitting there naked – and yet, for reasons known only to God and the two of them, decided that instead of doing anything naked-sexy, they wanted to KEEP PLAYING POKER. But they had no more clothes to bet, so they started betting sex acts, carefully keeping track of their ongoing bets on lists. One of their roommates found one of the lists one day and asked about it, and that’s when the idea of keeping track of poker bets on a list got adopted for more general and less salacious purposes.)

Conclusion: This is the best thing ever and must be adopted immediately. I think we just found our lightning round, people.

In the event of a CrapScrabble tie (or whenever someone farts audibly) the challengers get a new handful of tiles, and five minutes to create the best thing they can come up with (which will be hidden from their opponent) and they then move to Surrealist Poker-style betting on who has the better word/words/miniature Eiffel Tower made of tiles/whatever. Then the opponents reveal and explain their creations, and the winner is rewarded with the paper list of prizes. (The list should be pinned on their homemade CrapScrabble sash or crown, which they can wear to all future games and most black-tie events.

I want to play right now just so I can say “I see your sack of sloths, and I raise you the gravy. ALL THE GRAVY.”

Wow. And to think I came close to discarding a bag of scrabble tiles yesterday when I was clearing out the basement. I could throw in the BINGO balls I was going to toss as well. Like the proverbial Hen3ry, the numbers will have to be silent.

I think I’d excel at Crapscrabble. But I have two questions:
1. Is there a time-limit? On the one hand I hate to be rushed, but on the other hand, think of how much a Major League Baseball game would be enhanced by the use of a shot-clock.
2. If the cat coughs up a hair-ball on my letters, can I use it as a blank?

(No time limit. Play continues until everyone gets distracted or hungry. If the cat horks on your tile you automatically lose. That is the cats way of disqualifying you. ~ Jenny)

Have you ever heard of “Mow”? My aunt taught me, kind of the same principal only with cards, not Scrabble tiles. It sounds right up your alley, or back street, or front porch, or under your refrigerator, or maybe under MY refrigerator! Which ever is closest and has a dead mouse under it…

Does your Dad win every game he plays? Those are great words. I, unfortunately (for this game anyway), am very bad at lying. What happens if you accidentally play a real word? Is there a challenge for that?

Looking at that photo of all the tiles in giant bowl, I realize that I don’t want so much to play the game as much as I want to push my hands deep into the bowl and let the tiles slowly trickle off my hands. Repeatedly. You know, where it almost feels like a relaxing massage. Can I call that a game so I can still play with you guys? You can catch the tiles as they fall off my hands. Otherwise I’ll be sitting in the corner with the giant bowl and playing with the tiles.

(That is honestly the reason that bowl exists in the first place. The feel of the tiles and the noise they make when they lightly crack together. No one walks past it without putting their hand in. ~ Jenny)

my family invented the “dictionary” game. The rules were that you and your team would pick a word in the dictionary that you were sure no one else would know the meaning of and then either make up your own meaning or use the real meaning. The other teams would have to also think of a meaning and then we all picked which one we thought was real or not, or something along those lines. My Grandfather’s go to answer was always “A kind of fish”. You never knew when it would really be a fish…

I play a lot of scrabble with my grandma. When I was in high school I made my best friend start playing with us. A few years ago my friend admitted to cheating. Sometimes she would have more than 7 tiles, she would look up a word and assure us it was in the dictionary when it was not. I think you two may be related.

If anyone who does not have a cat wishes to play, I have a couple slightly used ones you can borrow. I only want them back when they learn not to wake me at 2 a.m. by screaming in my face in two part harmony.
Cats….

I pretty much feel like life has been a lie up to this point. How have I made it so far without a giant bowl of scrabble pieces? Also, I second the putting the hands in the bowl idea. It will probably go down much nicer than all the times I slide up to my elbows in yogurt pretzels at the health food store. People, apparently, frown on that.

Drunk Jenga is also awesome. You write stupid things to do on each little piece and you have to do whatever is written on the piece you pull out. The drunker you get, the more likely you are to do the stupid stuff.

This is tremendous! First, clearly everyone here is showing up at your place for game night. Second, my dad needs to know about this game. The man cleans up in both regular Scrabble and Fictionary (wherein you make up a bullshit word and an equally bullshit definition, and try to pass it off as legit). Apparently the ultimate secret weapon in Fictionary is to use the phrase “of or pertaining to” in the bullshit definition. Sounds very Miriam-Webster-y. Fools people every time.

Oh god people don’t discard your old Scrabble tiles — send them to me. Or at least one “C” and one “W” because I once thought it was a GREAT IDEA to make scrabble-tile jewelry for a friend of mine. And I’ve never seen as old a set at a garage sale since.

This.is.so.awesome!! You just beat my boyfriend at making up games, and he’s the original inventor of Aquaduck (which involves using a microphone stand as a golf club and people attacking you with super soakers).

This was something that my college friends came up with (I’ll explain how shortly) where the twist in the rules doesn’t apply to the game play – rather, it applies to the BETTING. It’s just plain old, straight-up, five-card-draw poker; but, you can bet anything. And I mean literally ANYTHING.

What I mean is – the dealer for each hand deals out the first five cards like usual. The dealer also has a piece of paper and a pen. And the first person opens the bidding by stating what they are going to bid – and it can be ANYTHING IN THE ENTIRE WORLD. One opening bid I remember was “three cacti”. The dealer writes that down. And then everyone else has a turn betting, and they too can bet ANYTHING. And the dealer writes all that down.

The fun comes in with the discussions people have negotiating the comparative worth of each bid – does “a herd of stampeding Mogwai” MATCH the current bid of “1953”, or does it RAISE the bid? Because if it raises the bid, everyone has to go around and either ante up with something else, or fold. And of course their new bid could end up unintentionally raising the bid again, which sets off another round of discussion, and often another round of bidding.

Once you’ve all settled on all the bidding and are finished, it’s time to show your hands – and the winning hand is ascertained the same way it is in regular poker. And then the dealer reads off the ENTIRE LIST of all of the random shit that’s been bid over the course of that hand before presenting it to the winner. Then you get another dealer, another piece of paper, and you start over.

This was PERFECT for a bunch of arty and nerdy college students who had more creativity and goofiness than they had money or shame. And I did actually win 1953 in a hand once.

(I said I was going to explain how this happened – it’s actually even more ridiculous; a couple in our ranks were apparently playing strip poker once, and played to the point where they were both sitting there naked – and yet, for reasons known only to God and the two of them, decided that instead of doing anything naked-sexy, they wanted to KEEP PLAYING POKER. But they had no more clothes to bet, so they started betting sex acts, carefully keeping track of their ongoing bets on lists. One of their roommates found one of the lists one day and asked about it, and that’s when the idea of keeping track of poker bets on a list got adopted for more general and less salacious purposes.)

(This is the best thing ever and must be added. I think we just found our lightning round. In the event of a CrapScrabble tie, the challengers will have 5 minutes to create a new word (which is hidden from their opponent) and they then move to Surrealist Poker-style betting on who has the better word. I want to play right now just so I can say “I see your sack of sloths, and raise you gravy. ALL THE GRAVY.” ~ Jenny)

you used to be able to buy scrabble tiles in almost any colour imaginable (I bought dark blue) but I can’t find the supplier online anymore. they do seem to be coming up on eBay though so you could add some random colours to increase game complexity.

For those looking for just tiles (not wood) check out Bananagrams. An excellent game (fast paced no waiting around) and could definitely be used for Crapscrabble. Would LOVE to see you on the TableTop show. Looking forward to TableTop Game Day in April!

I expect to read a story about Thrift Stores having a run on Scrabble games in the next week or so. And maybe people having their houses broken into and the only that is missing is the Scrabble game. Because some of these people strike me as shady…just saying.

You are SO my hero & Cosmically related to me, it is hilariously wonderful!
I’d get together with some of my more weirdly-canted family & friends, and we’d invent and play games like what you describe:

One favorite was The Dictionary Word game, which followed many of your rules.
FWIW, this was back int the early-to-mid later 70’s.
My older sister and I also came up with a sort bicycle “dog-fighting (as in: AIRPLANES, not dogs)”
using those plastic dart-guns. I was about 18, and she about 24 when we did this.
NOW there are Paint-Ball things.
I feel cheated: I could have been famous !
Your carry the torch onward, My Sistah! ;

Sold.
This Saturday night’s Game Night shall now officially include CrapScrabble. Perhaps with Rory’s story cubes, Jenga blocks and Keva planks mixed in with the tiles…and wine. This sounds like a wine game.

For another variation, my friends and I have the scrabble rule that if you make up a word and you can draw a picture of the word, it counts. Our two favorites:
1) Jammeow = cat in a jam jar
2) Merwolf = wolf from the middle up, mermaid from the middle down

This reminds me of the game of Spoons that my cousins and I played with Grandma, when we substituted a fork for one spoon and told Grandma that the last one to notice the utensils missing had to get stabbed in the hand with the fork. 🎉

Oh my god this game would be amazing for us, we spend almost all of our weekend playing drunk versions of 5 second rule, rummikub and ring of fire. Drunk CrapScrabble would take our weekend social activities to an all new high. Or low. Depends how bad at the game you are.

Some creative person who works in Polymer clay could make themselves an epic set of letter tiles. Not sure they would clink as nicely in a glass bowl, but bonus points for art. I LOVE this idea. And the poker game where you can bet anything in the world.
I bet all of the leftover candy canes from Christmas.

We have a version of Scrabble, it’s called “No Rules, Dirty Words Scrabble”. Obviously it’s an adult only game because the only rule (in No Rules Dirty Words Scrabble) is that you have to play a dirty word or a word that can be used in a dirty sentense. You can reuse other players tiles you don’t even have to stay on the board – after a while we don’t even take turns. Adult beverages makes this game a lot more fun. 🙂

My family would love CrapScrabble and I’m so upset I sold the Scrabble game at my yard sale when I sold my house and just about everything I owned. Another penalty in CatchPhrase could be to make someone say a word most people mispronounce and embarrass themselves. Such as élan, cacophony, and nuclear.

There was one hand where someone bet “teenage angst” and another person matched that with “the 83-year-old Indonesian lady who wraps all your dry cleaner hangers in paper”. that may have been the hand with 1953 in it.

another time I tried betting “yahtzee”, and things ground to a negotiating halt when I had to explain that I was not betting a copy of the board game Yahtzee, I was betting “yahtzee” as an independent concept. I still don’t quite know what I meant. (Probably nothing. It was midterms and I was sleep-deprived.)

I’m terrible at regular Scrabble so this would be great for me. Although when it comes to games that involve drinking, I never understand why the loser has to drink MORE. I always think the prize for winning should be to get drunk. This is why I still don’t truly understand the rules for “King’s Cup” because I try to lose and then forget the rules when I black out.

So hilariously true story- when I was in high school, we had a youth lockin at my church (Basically 30-40 teenagers determined to stay up all night, with 4-5 chaperones desperate to go to bed). Around 4 am we decided to start playing Scrabble, got bored with it, and started introducing our own rules. Rule Number One being that you were allowed to make up your own words so long as you could also come up with a legitimate sounding definition for said word. My favorites (that I can still remember): Rubnarfgekokidy (the state of being severely depressed and/or sarcastic about life.), Parlexio gas (the cause and cure of rubnarfgekokidy), and Cwinjalazo (An Arabian taco, only found at Canadian Taco Bells). Your version sounds like ours on Steroids (or just alcohol?). I can’t wait to try it at our next wine night.

Well. It just so happens that I have a ridiculous number of Scrabble tiles just lying around my house from that time I thought I would attempt to be crafty. This sounds like fun. I’m so going to make people play it.

Might I recommend looking up Run for Your Life, Candyman? And then playing with real gingerbread man cookies and red food coloring gel as the blood stains on the gingerbread man? It’s a take on Candyland, but with shooting and stabbing and biting off the head of your enemy. Highly recommended. Just saying.

I think I need to set up a game of CrapScrabble for my sister’s baby shower.
I’m a little concerned with farting for another handful of pieces..? What if someone accidentally shits themselves because they were trying to fart because they needed more pieces? No one wins.
I need to borrow some cats now for this shower. Mine get travelers’ diarrhea too.

I’m confused. When you play strip poker, you are supposed to put on the clothes you win. It was a great first date idea because I cheat at poker. Nothing is better than being fully dressed standing next to a naked man who doesn’t know you well enough to know you are really nice underneath all his clothing, and he HAS to do something to get his clothes back so he can go home.

I so want to meet you, and your dad. I came up with areptiledysfunction last month. My neighbour (a single, part-time dad) has a lizard and a turtle for his kids, but he works in Russia so he leaves for a month at a time. I am officially on turtle and lizard duty while he is gone. i declared that the lizard had areptiledysfunction every time his family disappeared.

About 20 years ago my husband and I were living in Nowheresville, Montana and my best friend had come out to visit for two weeks. My husband and my best friend and I invented a game that we called “Fuju”. We were sitting in a restaurant one day and the wait for our food was long and boring, and my friend absent-mindedly moved the salt shaker. My husband picked up the pepper shaker and clinked it against the salt shaker and then set it down in a new place and said “Check”. My friend replied, without missing a beat, “Are you using the 1974 Blue Book rules or the 1978 Yellow Book rules?” and “Fuju” was born. (We called it “Fuju” because that’s what “Fooled You” sounds like when you’re laughing really, really hard.)

A few days later the three of us went to my husband’s aunt and uncle’s ranch to celebrate Thanksgiving with the aforementioned aunt and uncle as well as my husband’s parents. My husband (Adam, his name is Adam) and my best friend (Ace) started goofing around with a ‘game’ of “Fuju” and my mother-in-law, drink it hand, wandered over to see what was up. After watching a few rounds and cluing in, she asked if she could play. Smirking, Adam and Ace said sure. Adam went, Ace went, and then my mother-in-law slammed her drink down on the table, hollered “Gin!” and got up and walked away. My mother-in-law actually won a made-up game with no rules. I love my mother-in-law.

Anyway, that’s what your CrapScrabble reminded me of, and I had to share. Feel free to work our “rules” into your rules if you wish 🙂

My friends and I regularly play board games (when you play Settlers of Catan, we leave the “friends” part at the door, to be resumed after the game). This sounds like what we need to do next time we play. Definitely. Along with the lightning round. But no cats, cuz they’re allergic. (The friends, not the cats.)

I have a birthday coming up, and just sent this out to all my friends to start collecting scrabble tiles, and also to find someone we can borrow a cat from. Do you have any rules for what happens in the game when you bring a strange cat into a socially anxious dogs home?

Crapscrabble will become a world-wide phenomenon….in my world…maybe not the whole world. Time will tell on that.

We used to play a game where an obscure word was read and then people would make up definitions and if their definition was picked as the real definition, then you got points. My stepdaughter always had THE BEST fucking definitions. Things like….Old men who live in forests and feed squirrels and rake logs.

OK, crapscrabble sounds like 50 Shades of Awesome, but I want expanded rules for drunk Catchphrase! Maybe they could all be combined… 1) grab tiles 1a) drink 2) describe the Catchphrase word using only words formed with the tiles 2a) swig 3) Whoever guesses the Catchphrase word must use it in a surrealistic way, ie: “Rosie O’Donnell dressed as a sloth drank a gravy smoothie”

Have you ever played “Fictionary”? One person picks a hard word out of the dictionary and everyone makes up a definition, or, if they knew it, give the real definition. We played it in church youth group one Sunday and I won one round for “panoply — a room that you look across. From ‘pan,’ ‘across’ and ‘op,’ ‘eye.'”

We played Mao all through my final year of school every lunch. As I understand it’s named after Emperor Mao in honour of the random and silly laws he passed. (Like commanding everyone to spend days doing nothing but kill flies) At least, that’s what I got out of Modern History… card games 🙂

This is so much like playing Monopoly with a 6 year old, a 10 year old and a 15 year old dog. The dog’s role is mainly to play Godzilla and stomp across the board at random intervals, turning all properties into the rubble of downtown Tokyo. There is usually a song & dance number, a snack break (I once got to put up an extra hotel because I provided brownies) and lego bricks for houses/hotels (skyscrapers cost extra, earn more rent, but are quite vulnerable to the Godzilla attacks). Game pieces can be supplemented with other toys, but any dolls used in game play must be clothed (this is a family game, folks, so no naked Barbies on my Monopoly board).

I love Surrealist Poker! It’s in one of my favorite movies from when I was a teenager was “Benny and Joon” with Johnny Depp. It was released back in ’93, but I don’t think I ever saw it till 10 years later.

In the movie’s game, Joon bets that if she wins her opponent, Mike, has to re-grout her bathroom with green grout. Then he raises with a lava lamp and that the loser shampoos his dog. She comes back with “Scrape and Paint the exterior of my house” and his all in is “You take my cousin off my hands.” She loses her hand and has to take home Mike’s crazy cousin, Sam (played by Johnny Depp). They fall in love and are so adorable! Joon is mentally ill, Benny, her brother, is way over protective, and Sam is a total oddball who never learned to read. It’s so funny and makes me cry just a little bit every time.

I always wanted to join that poker game. You never know what will happen if you join that game!

I’ve played drunk catchphrase. I told my father-in-law’s girlfriend that she’s “never the designated driver” when she was trying to give the clue “bride”. One of her sons-in-law mentions it every time the family gets together.

So… I used to have a friend that was as much of a Harry Potter nerd as I am. We challenged each other to what we called Harry Potter Scrabble. We had two complete Scrabble sets, and each made our own “boards” with only words that are related to Harry Potter. (Hippogriff, Knockturn, Beauxbaton, etc.) The topic can be changed to anything. Only cat related words, for example. (or travel, science, ice cream… anything!) The first person to use ALL of the tiles wins.